by Meg Collett
“No, you told her enough so she could target me. You fed the wolves fodder, and now they’re nipping at my heels.”
“I emphasized to her how special this house is to you,” he said in a rush. “That you would have a hard time parting with it. I thought I was doing you a favor.”
“Have a hard time?” Her voice cracked. The night she’d spent in jail was exacting its toll on her, but she waved her hand up toward the house. “This is all I have of them. This house is all that’s left. I won’t leave them.”
Gregory’s face crumpled. “Violet, your parents are gone. It’s just a house.”
Violet shuffled to the door and opened it, the darkness inside calling to her, warm and welcoming like a hug. She wanted to lie down in her parents’ bed and not wake up for years. She wanted to fall away from this world of awful people and settle in a dreamland, a place frozen in time before her father got sick, when she was young and her mother used to bake cakes and let Violet decorate them.
“No,” she whispered, too quiet for Gregory’s aging ears to pick up, “it’s not.”
7
People presented many problems for Violet. The biggest one being that they—all of them, every single one—existed in a solitary world where they thrashed and banged about, leaving destruction in their wake without a thought to those in their path. Anyone who got in the way were the ones who got hurt or left behind. People lived to hurt others. There was simply no other way around it. In the end, even if a person was as kind and caring as possible, they would still die and leave forever. Death became this barrier everyone inevitably crashed into—the final period on a paragraph of life that would always read too short, too incomplete.
People lived to hurt others and then they died doing the same exact thing. They weren’t worth it. None of them. Not even her parents. Especially not them.
She lived her life alone for a reason. If she let no one in, no one could leave.
She laid in bed, curled around herself, and imagined her body morphing into one of those insect exoskeletons she used to find clinging to trees, brittle and forgotten, crumpling into nothing with each brush of wind. The curtains were all drawn tight, turning time into a meaningless void while she too crumbled. It was a game she’d often played, to be as still as possible, to barely breathe, to fade into an oblivion where she felt nothing but the darkness around her, the cool press of the sheets against her bare arms, and the beat of her heart as it became the ticking metronome of her life.
Sleep came and went. Came and went. Came and went.
She might have heard knocking on a door at some point, but it could have been the house. It played her The Temptations again. “Stand By Me” on her mother’s lips, Violet singing along softly as the old vinyl played downstairs. As if it could know, the house squeezed in around her, its beams and seams groaning with the effort, and held her tight. These were the moments Violet thought the house was more than just a house. It contained an imprint of her parents, of her, that would never leave or die or hurt her. It wrapped her up in a dark, warm blanket of memories and hummed her to sleep. This was why she would never leave it; it had never left her.
Sleep now, my little spider. Sleep.
* * *
Knocking sounded from downstairs, against the front door. It was rhythmic and constant, like her metronome heart, but on an alternate beat, interrupting her and setting her off balance just enough for her to wake up bit by bit. She lifted her head a fraction to peer across the dark room to the hall beyond.
The rapping continued, and she took in a long, deep breath—the first in a while. She lost the feeling of her heartbeat, of the house hugging around her and the oblivion she’d sunk into. The knocking brought her back to life, and she hated it.
She worked herself out from under the mound of blankets she didn’t remember piling onto herself. Perhaps the house had done it, thinking her cold or simply wanting to tuck her in. She wasn’t awake enough to turn away the thought as being absurd. To her, in that moment, the house was more alive.
Her feet brushed against the cracking, cold floor and she hissed. She tightened the chunky-knit sweater around herself, her hair a flattened mess where she’d left it wet after the shower she took before falling into bed. She hurried down the hall. Her leggings were woolen and thick, but with her bare feet, the cold intruded against her, forcing her to shiver and walk faster just to warm up. She bounced down the stairs, making them pop in complaint, and the banister squeaked beneath her hand.
The knocking hadn’t stopped, not even for a split second.
She should have checked the window to see who the knocker was. It would have been a mistake to open the door and find Francesca Morgan on the other side, waiting to tear apart her house again, or even to see Gregory out there, rumpled and tired, thinking her truly dead this time and being surprised when she answered the door, very much alive.
She unlocked the deadbolts and heaved the door back, the swollen jam releasing with a sucking noise and the pressure in the house letting out a hefty sigh around her.
Arie dropped his hand and stared at her. He looked ever the California-skater type in his plaid and white sneakers with a brown paper bag in his hands. His beard was neat and trimmed, still wet from a shower, and his hair was combed back, the ends mostly dry and smooth against each other. With the late afternoon sun at his back, his face was cast in shadows, his even darker eyes squinting as he examined her from head to toe.
She tightened her grip on the door at his sweeping gaze. Somehow, she’d known he was the person knocking on her door.
It wasn’t socially polite to be silent this long, but she waited until his eyes meandered their way back to hers. He simply said, “I need to put the birdhouses up.”
The words brought her completely back to life, turning away every ounce of oblivion she’d worked for. She was awake now, no turning back. “What day is it?”
“Wednesday.”
She inhaled deeply. She’d been locked in her parents’ room for nearly thirty hours. Her stomach ached from neglect, and as her body wound back to life too, she felt the dizziness in her head and the shaky weakness in her knees. “You finished the wood pile.”
The brown bag crinkled as he ran a hand over his beard. “I had to do something yesterday. No one knew what happened, and I couldn’t get any answers from the police operator.”
She held back a wince. He’d probably called Stevie or Kyra or Maggie. They would all know by now. She needed to change the subject before she sunk back down again. “And you have all of the birdhouses done? All one hundred?”
“All of them. You want to check?”
“I trust you.”
He studied her and eventually said, “Good, because I brought you soup, and you’re going to eat it while I watch and make sure you’re okay for myself.”
“Are you inviting yourself into my house?”
“Is that a problem.” Not a question. Just a flat statement, delivered with a twitch of his eyebrow.
“It’s not exactly the best time.”
His eyebrow inched higher. “Why? You planning on getting arrested again?”
Maybe it was the warm cheesy smell wafting from the bag, but she relented and inclined her head. She took the bag from his hand and stepped away from the door, moving into the kitchen. She sat the bag on the rosewood table and heard him come inside, his steps slow as though he was looking around, checking things out. Maybe he was noting the record player on the hall table or the painting of the lighthouse above it or the stained-glass window next to the door that, at this time of day, cast colored streams of light over the floor.
Eventually, he came into the kitchen as she unpacked the broccoli cheddar soup and soft, still-warm baguette. She moved around the kitchen and pulled down a bowl and an old solid silver spoon, her movements a coordinated dance. The room was as familiar to her as her thumbprint.
She poured the soup into the bowl and sat down. After a few sips, she looked up at Arie. “Are
you going to watch me eat it all?”
He leaned against the door frame but didn’t venture any farther inside. “I’m trying to figure out the best way to ask what happened without coming across as an asshole.”
“My grandmother spent a lot of time teaching me how to be polite and use proper etiquette at the proper times. She thought my mother had allowed me to grow up too freely. Because I look different, my grandmother often told me I would have to try harder for people to like me, and she promised they would like me if I was polite and nice and sweet.”
She pinched off a piece of bread and dunked it in the soup as Arie straightened off the door frame and came into the room to sit across the table from her. “Considering the way you are,” he said, crossing his legs at the ankles and stretching out his tall frame to settle in, “I assume her lessons didn’t work.”
“I tried, but people always found a way to be mean no matter how nice I was. So I stopped bothering. Just ask what you want to ask.”
“What happened Monday?”
She leveled her attention on him, and unlike most people, he didn’t turn away from her stare. His unflinching willingness to weather her oddities prized open the scabby wound in her heart and applied a balm. Arie’s words were simple. A true question.
“My estate lawyer told a development company my property was going up for sale soon. One of the partners came down Monday to present me with an offer. She was . . . persistent, and I don’t do well with strangers. She wouldn’t listen, and she just kept talking over me, and no matter what I said—” Violet paused and forced herself to slow the words tumbling from her mouth. She picked up her spoon and forced down another bite. “She just kept acting as if I wasn’t there or didn’t even exist. Then she broke a piece off the house, and it felt like she’d broken a piece off me. I just wanted her to stop.”
“You hit her?”
“I pushed her. She fell and hurt her hands. I shouldn’t have, obviously, but she shouldn’t have been here.”
“Why are you selling the house?”
“I’m not.”
He leaned back in his chair. “Okay. Why does your lawyer think you’re selling your house?”
Violet’s gaze fell back down to her soup bowl. It was half empty and quickly cooling. She sopped up another piece of bread and put it in her mouth. “He assumes a lot. He’s a lawyer, after all.”
“Violet—”
“I’m not selling it. I don’t need to.”
The look on his face said he didn’t believe her, but he wasn’t in a position to argue. “It’s just you, then? There’s no one else in the family?”
Her spoon clattered into the now-empty bowl, but she kept picking at the bread, pulling pieces loose and lining them up on the table. “My grandmother raised me here after my parents died. She passed away when I was nineteen. I’m the last of us.”
Eventually, as he remained quiet, she couldn’t resist glancing up at him to know if he pitied her or something else, but he was just tapping a finger on the table, his expression far enough away that she asked, “What about you?”
He raked a hand through his hair, smoothing it back with practiced ease. “I’ve got my mom and sisters back in Cali. Never knew my dad. Didn’t really need to.”
“Oh.”
His eyes narrowed. “Why? Do I look like the wholesome, happy-family type?”
“No.” She canted her head to the side. “I thought perhaps you might have followed your father into the military. You strike me as the honorable type.”
He let out a short laugh. “Honorable? No. I needed a quick way to help pay the bills. There wasn’t honor, just desperation.”
“Then why did you do three tours?”
She had hit the line he didn’t want to cross. His time in the military was a shaded gray area for him. His eyes flickered with it and darkened as his eyebrows lowered, deep furrows sinking into the smooth, brown skin of his forehead. He was thinking about something long gone and far away. Maybe back in Afghanistan or Iraq. Maybe somewhere else he’d been and couldn’t forget.
He lifted a shoulder. “Just stuck, I guess.”
She let the moment slide between them. She picked up the spoon and tapped a soft, chiming beat against the chipped china bowl. “Car crash,” she said eventually, the two words spilling from a deep well inside of her.
She had a line too—a shaded gray area as big as the house they sat in—but she’d never had anyone to push her to cross it, never had anyone to ask her about the gray zone. The secrets weren’t well guarded, and Arie pulled them from her with only his silence.
“My parents,” she said, quieter now, “died in a car crash when I was twelve. My father had ALS, which caused a number of other issues. He had a seizure that night, and Mother had to drive him to the hospital. It started raining. They skidded off a bluff out here on the northern point of the island.” She frowned, thinking back to the week after the night everything had changed. “I’ve never known where. They’d pulled the car out and cleaned up the road by the funeral. Grandmother didn’t let me watch the news. And later, all I found about the accident’s location was just the road name without a mile marker to distinguish it.” She swallowed, sinking deeper into that gray area. “Sometimes, I stand out on the bluff behind the house and look down the road winding along the edge and wonder where it happened. I think I might feel it somehow if I’m still enough.” She tugged herself back out of the fog.
Arie watched her, his expression neutral. She told herself to stop talking, but once secrets were spoken, they fought to be rebottled.
“Less than a year before the night they crashed, I heard them speaking about it. I’d snuck out of my room, wanting to sleep between them like they sometimes let me if it was storming. But when I heard what they were talking about, I waited outside their door.”
His eyes were on her face, so she turned her attention to the spoon in her hand and the chime of it against the delicate china. Finally, he asked, “What were they talking about?”
“How my father would die,” Violet said simply.
“How old were you?”
Violet swirled the spoon along the bowl’s rim, her thoughts shifting to that night and her father’s trembling voice. The medicine had long been eating away at his mind, causing him to say the dark things he shouldn’t—the words meant to remain only whispers in the back of one’s mind, hidden away because they were too wrong to say aloud. But he’d said them anyway.
“He was begging my mother. Crying.” Violet rolled the spoon between her fingers. She’d never told anyone this. “He said she couldn’t let him die alone, because he was scared.”
Arie waited. She imagined he wore his typical solemn gaze, the one that said nothing could surprise him, though she didn’t confirm it by looking up.
“She didn’t kill him that night they crashed, if that’s what you’re wondering.” Violet paused, considering it. “At least I don’t think she did. He might have kept asking her, and she might have given in. Or maybe she knew he needed the mercy. Either way, my grandmother certainly thought she’d sent the car over the edge on purpose.”
“You said he was having a seizure the night of the accident?”
“It wouldn’t stop. I remember hearing his teeth clacking together and seeing his legs jerking. My mother had to lie on top of him to keep his head from bashing against the floor.”
“You were in the room?” There was horror in his voice now, and she guessed the story could be horrifying if heard for the first time. But it was just a part of her now. Just another memory.
“I helped Mother get him into the car. By then, he’d gone still. His eyes were open but he wasn’t there anymore. You could just tell. But my mother was crying and shaking so hard that I begged her to let me drive even though I was too little to reach the peddles. It was about to start raining at any second, and the hospital was on the other side of the island.”
The spoon whined along the bowl’s rim.
“As soon as
they drove down the drive, it began to rain.”
“Had your grandmother moved in by this point?”
She looked up then. She’d been right about Arie’s expression. He watched her without moving much, his hands resting on the table as though he was forcing them to stay there. “She had. She and my mother found it very difficult to be in the house at the same time. They took to rotating. One would arrive and the other would slip out the back.”
“What about an ambulance? 9-1-1?”
“Back then,” Violet said, “there was one ambulance on the island. It was broken down, or so the operator said when my mother called.”
“You don’t think it actually was?”
“I think being eccentric and different is only okay for so long. People expect conformity at a certain point or, at least, that’s what I’ve discovered living on this island my entire life. People don’t like weird, especially if it tries to use the resources allocated to the ‘normal.’ Weird should only be tucked away in a corner and forgotten.”
She sounded more bitter than she’d expected. Her entire life, thoughts of that broken-down ambulance had haunted her. The timing of it all. How easy it would have been to turn away a Relend calling for help all the way up on their cliff, in the big house with all the fancy things. The gizmos that had earned them so much money. The strange child with weird eyes.
“Violet . . .”
The spoon stilled on the rim, and she lifted her gaze once again. “I hope my father woke up during the drive.” The words were slow and whispered, maybe because they were the dark ones she wasn’t supposed to speak aloud, like her father’s. “I hope he was holding my mother’s hand when she lost control of the car along the bluffs. I hope he knew he wouldn’t be dying alone that night. I hope they had time to say they loved each other one more time.”
She hinged up her jaw against the other words, the worst words that threatened to follow right on the tail of the others. The ones that kept her up at night and kept her mother’s voice in her head. Kept the house talking to her.
